Lynden Cline’s
"secrets" at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts

The galleries at the Delaware Center
for the Contemporary Arts (DCCA) were dark last summer, not from any
lack of funding, but intentionally dim for exhibitions by two
Mid-Atlantic sculptors. Both artists darkened their individual galleries
and highlighted selected areas to direct the viewer’s gaze and enhance
the impact of their works. Shadows reflected on the walls and floor of
the galleries also added to the visual appeal. Lynden Cline had the
walls painted a deep blood red, which contributed to the
"dark" physical and emotional impact of her works. Michael
Miller’s installation was illuminated only by small light bulbs
strategically placed within the work to reflect in mirrors and other
glass objects. Coming into the DCCA galleries from the bright summer
sunshine for each of these shows was like entering a different world.

Both Cline and Miller are interested in
the act of viewing and relationship of the viewer to the work. Cline’s
vignettes include small chairs, beds, and other ordinary objects
fabricated from steel. The darkened wood pedestals and metal frameworks
that are part of these sculptures bring the pieces to eye level. Most
are cage-like, keeping us outside looking in. The objects in Cline’s
vignettes are arranged to induce viewers to make up their own narratives
about what might have happened here. We can speculate about why one
chair might be turned over or why all the beds have grown exceedingly
tall or why one spike has fallen over while all the others are ramrod
straight. Her intriguing titles also give clues about the possible
meanings of these pieces. These are haunting works that one remembers
long after visiting the exhibition.

In the intense Several months before
you were born, I married a man who wasn’t your father (2002), one
looks inside a three-tiered wedding-cake-like metal structure to view a
small table and four chairs – one overturned. The glaring spotlight
hanging over the scene makes it seem as though an interrogation or some
other painful confrontation has just taken place. Reading the artist’s
statement, one learns that Cline never knew her biological family and
waited some time before being adopted. Her art-making seems to be a
cathartic act exorcising emotional pain and reflecting her personal
history. In Spanish, the word "to wait" is the same as the
word "to hope"...esperar (pictured) also evokes strong
emotions. One looks through a metal fence structure at a small hole cut
into the dirt-covered floor of a wooden stand set on rockers. On the
floor beneath, one sees the missing dirt arranged to exactly match the
dimensions of the hole above. The work included in "secrets"
bares Cline’s feelings and reflects her intense emotional history, but
it is not sentimental; instead it is poetic and evocative, leaving much
to the viewer’s own imagination.

WHYY
Television -- PBS Affiliate
Philadelphia, PA

July 28, 2003

Review by:
Lynn Cates

Lynden
Cline's "secrets"

News Anchor:Coming up next, using cold hard steel to
bring life to emotions. That’s the theme of this new art exhibit in
Wilmington. We’ll take you there. Its all coming up on WHYY's Delaware
Tonight.

News Anchor:A
one of a kind exhibit of steel sculptures is the newest entry at the
Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. Its Lynden Cline’s
"secrets" on display through the end of August. WHYY’s
videographer Lynn Cates takes us on the tour.

Neil Watson, Executive Director, Delaware
Center for the Contemporary Arts:Lynden
Cline is an artist who is based in Washington, DC. And she works with
steel. She uses universal symbols, universal objects – trees, fences,
chairs, and for her they have specific meaning. But for a visitor and
for a viewer, when they experience her work it becomes universal in a
sense that every viewer brings their own experiences to the work as well
as what the artist’s intent originally was. One of the remarkable
things about Lynden’s work ultimately is the fact that what drives the
work is as much about space and about how there is so much air within
the sculptures. If you start to look at the works you will see that
because of the nature of the steel and the images that she uses, they
are dense in their intent and in their imagery but at the same time they
are very airy. She makes it effortless and in that way it just reveals
the work even more.

Philadelphia
Inquirer

August 10, 2003

Review by:
Victoria Donohue

Visual
Arts -- Must See

A solo exhibition
at Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts features sculptor Lynden
Cline of Washington, whose work in steel has a tense overlay of meaning
and urgency because it centers on personal identity, family, and her
status as an adopted child who never knew her biological relatives.

Brandywine
Community News
(Wilmington, DE)

August 15, 2003

Review by:
Paula Shulak

Modernist Art
at Center

A visit to the Delaware Center for the
Contemporary Arts is always interesting. Of the four recent exhibits, I
recommend one, entitled "secrets" by Lynden Cline.

...However, I did greatly appreciate the
dark, monochromatic sculptures of Lynden Cline who bases her work on the
fact that she was adopted and never knew her real parents. This exhibit
is an intensely personal as "Wake" (another exhibit at DCCA)
but in a way which is equally meaningful for the viewer.

Illumination is important and almost
every piece has a candle, bulb or some other light focus and in addition
is placed high on a platform of some type as if the artist is forever
reaching upward toward some unknown answer. And, it is amazing into how
many different forms she melds steel.

She too uses a gestural method and allows
her inner self to guide her work, but in a much more successful way
(than in "Wake"). Her titles reveal an inner struggle to
unravel the many secrets of her existence – "Several months
before you were born, I married a man who wasn’t your father" and
"In Spanish the word ‘to wait’ is the same as the word ‘to
hope’...esperar" are just two examples.

Also, please be sure to see
"Bloodline II," a piece consisting of several varied size
steel rods all pointing upwards and surrounding a small steel dish of a
blood red substance. A powerful image which speaks volumes as do all of
Cline’s works. This is a most provocative exhibit.

Boston
Globe

May 31, 2002

Review by:
Cate McQuaid

Variety and
Skill Mark CAA Prize Show

Each spring, the Cambridge Art
Association mounts its National Prize Show, an ambitious effort that
this year drew entries from every state save North Dakota. The exhibit
deserves note not only for its scope but also for the distinguished
jurors it engages. This year, Lisa Dennison, deputy director and chief
curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, scrutinized nearly 3,700
slides before she chose the 135 works that made up the show.

It’s a big and varied exhibit, with
some strong work and some that falls flat...Other pieces that didn’t
win prizes deserve note...Lynden Cline’s sculpture "Several
months before you were born, I married a man who wasn’t your
father" is a black steel cage containing a small table and chairs,
suggesting the psychological and familial prison created by life stories
and the secrets that inform them.

...Lynden Cline’s series of elongated
empty-bed sculptures are subtly moving if inflected with a kind of muted
resentment that doesn’t seem healthy. According to the artist, who
writes that her work explores her emotions as an adoptee, "to be
adopted by someone is to be rejected by someone else." "I, not
rememb’ring how I cried out then, will cry it o’er again," she
says in one of
her titles.

Three monochromatic exhibits up now offer
an antidote to the visual melee. Like ocular sorbet, they cleanse the
palette, so to speak.

The "Hepner/Cline" show at 57 N
Fine Art might be subtitled "The Zen of Steel and Gray-Painted
Floorboards." Donna Hepner’s graphite drawings and Lynden Cline’s
metal sculptures fit right into this former warehouse, with its
white-painted brick and exposed steel supports, massaging the eye with
soothing gray and black.

...Sculptor Cline invokes tiny marvels,
too, in some of her simple steel sculptures about angst and anomie.
"Soft creamy center" sounds like something in a Whitman’s
Sampler, but it’s a tote bag fashioned out of steel whose sandblasted
surface and handles mimic the folds of leather. Inside the bag, a tiny
uncovered light bulb illuminates the prisonlike scene of a simple bed
and a high-backed chair. Cline’s bag-prison is a Freudian’s dream;
the dollhouse scale makes me wonder who lives there.

Washington
Post

June 10, 1999

Review by:
Ferdinand Protzman

‘Art-O-Matic’:
A Mixed Bag

If "Art-O-Matic," the
sprawling, labyrinthine exhibit at the Manhattan Laundry, had an
official symbol, it would have to be the glazed doughnut, because that’s
what a person’s eyes resemble after strolling past works by more than
350 artists. The space is so huge, the art so varied in style, concept
and quality that it’s difficult to take it all in at one go without
glazing over.

But for those who can spend a few hours
touring the vast Florida Venue space certain things become self-evident.
First among them is that the cream rises to the top.